Tag: public safety

You’re likely aware that plastics are harmful to your health. They have phenomenally long half-lives, and don’t break down in the body, causing ongoing damage.

Look on the bottom of your bottle, and see the number in the little triangle. Look carefully at this graphic, because the numbers aren’t consecutive. The worst grades of plastic are 6, 3, and 7.

A 7 is the worst grade of plastic, and most labeled 7 contain the most infamous chemical in plastics: Bisphenol A (BPA).

Water and other liquids leach BPA. This endocrine-disruptor chemical can do crazy things to your hormones. The U.S. finally banned the chemical in baby bottles, after the European Union and Canada did. Wiki says a study found BPA in 96% of pregnant women. It’s been linked to obesity, breast and prostate cancer, and ADHD.

Please don’t use old baby bottles or any other plastic that isn’t BPA free that comes into contact with your food or water. More and more companies are making their plastics without BPA, including Blendtec’s blender jars. But our FDA continues to support the use of BPA in cans, including drinks, and infant formula!

Another chemical to avoid is PVC (polyvinyl chloride), known as vinyl, which contains phthalates, known to cause birth defects in baby boys, testicular cancer, infertility, and asthma. PVC plastics are labeled with the 3 triangle.

About Dr. L telling me I should not talk about toxic dental practices and stick to whole foods topics only?

That is precisely the reason I have a blog in the first place.

I don’t want my readers to be as ignorant as I was when I was 27 years old and allowing doctors to tell me to feed my little boy spoonfuls of liquid steroids. I had dentists wanting to fill holes in his teeth with mercury as he got older (luckily, I never allowed that in any of my children). I’m livid that a dentist sent me home with little blue fluoride pills to feed my baby, not giving me the very real “other side” to the recommendation to have him eat sodium fluoride!

(Fortunately, in the case of the little blue pills, they sat there and expired during the two years after filling the prescription—I felt guilty every time I saw them, but I could not make myself feed them to my little boy. And fortunately, I knew enough that no child of mine has ever had an amalgam filling.)

I don’t have any interest in denigrating any profession. Certainly not dentists. I have had email correspondences with Dr. L since he attended a class I taught two years ago, and I know him to be a thoughtful, purposeful, open-minded vegetarian athlete who influences his patients for good.

However, I hope more dentists self-educate to offer other options and educate their patients against toxic practices. I’m sure it would be scary to have many practices that underpin your livelihood called into question—dentists carry debt on expensive equipment to perform these procedures and use these materials. But I’m not the researchers who have documented valid, massive concerns for the public health. I’m just one person waving a red flag towards it.

But I’m fierce that since I am blessed with an audience, I hope for my readers to start YOUNGER THAN I DID—or at any point!—with knowledge about controversies regarding their health. That way they won’t unwittingly allow unnecessary root canals in their mouth, as I did.

I hope my readers learn to QUESTION AUTHORITY. I don’t mean REJECT all authority across the board. I mean make your own decisions, do your own thinking, use your intuition. Study an issue well before doing something like fossilizing a dead tooth, or feeding your baby little blue pills of a known poison, or injecting your child with, well, anything. Expect that major industries—all of them—have an agenda. That agenda is often in conflict with the public health.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Learn to be a savvy consumer of information so you know what’s more likely to be true, and less likely. (In the intro to 12 Steps to Whole Foods, I write about evaluating research.)

I will not go silent on subjects where I think we are asleep at the wheel.

I may not be an “expert,” as Dr. L wanted me to know. But I am a HUGE FAN of parents becoming educated about the chemicals they feed their little ones. We should become layperson experts as much as possible—these issues have massive implications.

And while I believe dentists are good people trying to help us (Dr. L states that I am criticizing dentists), they do not always understand the implications of our drinking and eating synthetic fluoride.

If that’s the criticism—that I shouldn’t blog about dental issues because I’m not qualified—well, then, I’m not an expert on whole foods either. He didn’t like the quotes I used by a chemist, and he dismissed an entire book on the fluoride travesty by a journalist, because the journalist wrote a book for money so clearly he fabricated a fake controversy.

Adding fluoride to water is forced medication, and it’s not a fake controversy. It’s a real controversy for good reasons. Even if I accept Dr. L’s belief that children have fewer cavities if they drink fluoride or take fluoride pills, he offers no evidence that it’s safe for other organs and systems, to ingest it regularly. That’s because there IS no evidence of its safety. There is plenty of cause for concern and many studies documenting how dangerous it is.

If you feel that my blog should be limited to non-controversial topics related to whole foods only, perhaps you can just skip any posts on other topics? I’m a renegade, and this is a counter-culture blog. It just is.

If I’m blogging 5 times a week, for nearly 5 years now…..I don’t want to have limitations like that. I want to talk about what’s on my mind. Eating whole foods and giving the S.A.D. the boot will always be my favorite topic, though, so come back soon for more on that!

Tomorrow, I will post some interesting comments from a dentist who wrote in with her opinion on my comments on amalgam fillings and root canals.

This is a photo of me, my son Tennyson, and Citori and Jordan, the children of my friend Brent who is taking the photo. We were at the top of a mountain we had just climbed near Ephraim, Utah.

The picture was taken just a few minutes before I flipped the ATV I was driving with Tori on the back. I was taken off the mountain in a jeep and seen at the E.R. for a bruised kidney, sacral bone bruise, and concussion. I am very thankful to have no broken bones, because I remain in a tremendous amount of pain and spent the past 36 hours in bed after getting home from the hospital.

I tell you this story in the hopes that you WEAR A HELMET. I’m the one in the photo with the yellow helmet. You’ll notice that Brent’s family doesn’t wear helmets and I’m so thankful that Tori walked away from the accident with just a sore leg and foot where the 4-wheeler landed on her. (Jordan and Brent quickly got the machine off, which was spilling gasoline onto us.)

Brent took Tennyson to his games, took me to the hospital, sent flowers, and texted me this morning that he went home and cried because he couldn’t get the image out of his mind of me flying off the 4-wheeler, and lying in the dirt, and he felt responsible. Of course I could have said no to the proposal we go down a steep little ravine, and maybe things might have gone better if I didn’t run over that 4′ pine tree.

But if I got a concussion wearing a helmet, what would have happened if I didn’t?

Happy Father’s Day to all the men who provide for and love their children.

Tomorrow I’ll have some great recipes to use your early garden produce, from Michelle.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just granted approval to the natural herbal sweetener stevia.You may know that I endorse stevia as a sweetener I use because it is plant-based without altered (synthetic) molecules, it has no impact on blood sugar, and no adverse health effects have been reported from its use.In short, it’s a dramatic improvement over chemicals like Splenda, saccharin, and the widely used aspartame (brand name NutraSweet).

Aspartame is a public health nightmare.More complaints have come in to the FDA from its use the past two decades than all other food additives combined (and we have over 4,000 approved food chemicals).The frightening array of complaints include migraines and other neurological phenomena.

This doesn’t mean, incidentally, that your FDA is a friendlier organization somehow changed to truly protect your health.Far from it.The very same organization is well documented to have blocked stevia from store shelves just years ago.You couldn’t sell it as a food in health food stores (it had to be labeled so as to not make consumers think they could eat it).A company was banned from using it as an ingredient in its recipe book.Companies attempting to use it were threatened with fines.And stevia imports were seized and destroyed.

But due to public pressure following years of complaints about aspartame, Pepsi and Coca-Cola petitioned the FDA for stevia approval to replace aspartame in its products.So the FDA has yielded once again to big business, not somehow become committed to science, the public health interest, and safety.

The patented product they’ll be using is called Truvia, and from what I can learn, it does not contain any altered, synthetic ingredients.(I’ll let you know if I find out otherwise.)While this is good news, of course, two things I want you to think about:

The FDA is still bowing to corporate interests and its activities shouldn’t be the rubber stamp you use to guide your purchasing decisions.

Even when Diet Coke has stevia in it, it’s still really bad for you, so please don’t think it’s a health food.

Tomorrow, important information about another sweetener I endorse, agave nectar.

Community Shortcuts

GreenSmoothieGirl and GSGLife founder, Robyn Openshaw’s passion for educating people about diet and nutrition arose from her own personal journey. 20 years ago, Robyn weighed over 200 pounds and had 21 chronic diseases.

Getting off the Standard American Diet proved a lifesaver. Robyn lost 70 pounds without dieting, by converting to a whole-foods, mostly plant-based diet. Twenty years later, she is a competitive athlete, free of all disease and symptoms, and at her ideal weight.